Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on December 30, 2012 by Allahpundit

SEN. HARRY REID (D-NEVADA): We have been negotiating now for 36 hours or thereabouts. We did have conversations last night that ended late in the evening between staffs. This morning, we have been trying to come up with some counteroffer to my friend’s proposal. We have been unable to do that.

I have had a number of conversations with the president, and at this stage we’re not able to make a counteroffer. The Republican leader has told me that — and he’s just said here — that he’s working with the vice president, and he and the vice president, I wish them well.

In the meantime, I will continue to try to come up with something. But at this stage, I don’t have a counteroffer to make. Perhaps as the day wears on, I will be able to. I will say this, I think that the Republican leader has shown absolutely good faith. It’s just that we are apart on some pretty big issues.

***

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) released the following statement in response to President Obama’s appearance on Meet the Press this morning.

“Americans elected President Obama to lead, not cast blame. The president’s comments today are ironic, as a recurring theme of our negotiations was his unwillingness to agree to anything that would require him to stand up to his own party. Needed cuts and reforms that the president agreed to just last year were no longer on the table, as he cited an inability to sell them to Democrats.

“In an effort to get the president to agree to cut spending — which is the problem — I put revenues on the table last year, and I put them on the table again last month. Republicans made every effort to reach the ‘balanced’ deficit agreement that the president promised the American people, while the president has continued to insist on a package skewed dramatically in favor of higher taxes that would destroy jobs. We’ve been reasonable and responsible. The president is the one who has never been able to get to ‘yes.’

“The House has passed legislation to avert the entire fiscal cliff, and the president has never called for the Senate to act on those bills in any way. He instead has simply allowed the Democratic-controlled Senate to sit on them and lead our economy to the edge of the fiscal cliff. I am pleased Senators from both parties are currently working to find a bipartisan solution that can finally pass that chamber. That is the type of leadership America needs, not what they saw from the president this morning.”

***

Schumer instead blamed House Republicans for resisting compromise on a final deal.

“There are 50 hard right people in the House who don’t want to compromise. They don’t believe in any revenues, they say compromise is a dirty word. And Speaker [John] Boehner just as recently as last week played their tune,” Schumer said. ”You cannot make a deal if you’re going to let the people who are hardest right and uncompromising dictate what we should do.”

But Kyl rejected Schumer’s suggestion that House Republicans are to blame for the failure to get a deal.

“If the Democrats and Mr. Obama in particular don’t get more seriously into that discussion, they have no standing to complain about the Republicans’ lack of balance,” Kyl said. “This is not just a problem with the House. The House passed legislation that would overt the fiscal cliff, both on the sequestration side and on the tax rate side. They’ve already acted.”

But while Baucus and Landrieu have to worry about 2014, there’s a camp of liberals who don’t want Reid to budge at all unless McConnell caves to virtually all Democratic demands. They argue their party could work its will in the new year and have a much stronger hand to rewrite the Tax Code. Liberal Democrats warn that their party base will be furious at a deal they believe gives away too much, either by not raising taxes enough or by caving on spending cuts.

“I just hope the president doesn’t think he has to give away all this stuff,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “He’s in a much better position after the first of the year than he is now.”…

“We may get some disproportionate blame,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), “but there will be plenty to go around.”

***

Sen. Tom Coburn said Sunday there are some advantages to going off the so-called fiscal cliff.

“There are a lot of disadvantages. One of the advantages will be that the American people are going to see what the real cost of their government is — the actual real cost — for both the very wealthy. The very, very low will have minimal impact on them; it’s about $200 a year,” Coburn said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

***

Let us pray. Mighty God, have mercy upon us. Because of your unfailing love, because of your great compassion, let us feel your presence today on Capitol Hill as we gather with so much work left undone. Guide our lawmakers with your wisdom. Lord, show them the right thing to do and give them the courage to do it. Be their shelter in the midst of the storm, regardless of how high the waters rise. When they feel exhausted, remind them of the great sufficiency of your grace. Look with favor on our nation and save us from self-inflicted wounds. We pray in your strong name. Amen.

Blowback

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I love North Carolina and I love the people as if I were born here with them. Southern Hospitality and charm are real. So are their gigantic hearts. I cannot imagine the mentality of those that seems to need to run people like them down. So many of the liberals here are quick to blame all of our countries woes on their “backward ways”. I’ll take their backward ways any day of the week.

Dave and Keith, thanks from the bottom of my heart.

hawkdriver on December 30, 2012 at 11:14 PM

Great story. These kinds of things reflect the solid foundation of this country.

“These people truly believed that the Earth is not a globe!” Homuth said. “A lot of stuff like this got ignored and swept into history’s wastebasket. But at the time people actually believed this stuff!”

Incredibly, some people still do. The Flat Earth Society is an active organization currently led by a Virginian man named Daniel Shenton. Though Shenton believes in evolution and global warming, he and his hundreds, if not thousands, of followers worldwide also believe that the Earth is a disc that you can fall off of.

Ummm, think we’ll have a nice thick Tbone tonight. Might be the last time we can afford them. This tax increase on dividends is going to hurt those who saved their money while working and live off the proceeds the most. There’s enough pain in the increases and the hidden ones in Ocare to make all of us miserable.

I’ve listed ALL of their names. Let’s just remember all of the Democrats, who told the American middle class to f*ck off and die already 11 years ago and then claimed that their tax cuts were responsible for the “Great Recession.”

For everyone that made a nice comment about the two young men that helped me (saved me really from getting squished by some truck) thanks. I kind of thought you’d like to hear about some great Americans too for a change. I wish I hadn’t been so tired because there were so many great folks to relate about more specifically.

I’m not sure if everyone who hasn’t been around a while on Hot Air would understand why, first that I’d admit to being the cause of a major traffic jam on a busy two-way in the middle of the night or second why I’d waste your time relating the clean-up. It’s like this. We have had so many liberal commenters here who use the term “redneck” and even on occasion slipped in a “white trash” to describe us as their political opponents. One, who commented as Capitulus, then I’m quite sure was also KeninCT, absolutely thrived on commenting about NASCAR and engines on yards, lack of teeth and whatever. These kids with their thick Southern drawls would be the exact kind of person he would assume all of those stereotypes of, just by the accent they spoke with. A lot of the liberal trolls here are that direct and others have made the inferences to those stereotypes a bit more casually. I’ll just say again, these good people really are the salt of the Earth.

These two that came back were a fraction of the crowd that stopped originally to help clear the highway though. All colors, all ages. All stopping to help some idiot they didn’t know from Adam with a mess that they could easily just driven by. (After swerving, then honking) So, I’m not just still going on about the mishap for attention. I want other folks to know what motivates some of our faiths who comment here. Little prayers in the back of your mind when you are frantic. Running back and forth on a highway at night praying in the back of your mind that a car won’t have an accident because of you, then praying that no one stopping to help you will get hurt helping you move your mess. A few people while they were helping made comments like, “God was looking after you tonight.” Not because I flipped the back of my load, but because I didn’t hurt anyone in the process, the material wasn’t destroyed and a host of other bad things that could have happen, “didn’t” happen. And they were right. I believe even in my worst times, God looks after me and everything really is for a reason. The last folks to leave before the two young men came back were an older black couple. They’d parked behind my trailer and I was walking the older gentleman back across the road to his car and he was asking me also if I wanted him to stay and help. Embarrassed and afraid he’d get hurt I told him no standing by his car. His wife told me, “Then we’ll say a prayer for you, Sweetie.” We actually prayed together right there; for strength to finish an impossible task and not get hurt in the process. To get the stuff back to the property. Standing there after I shook his hand and touching his shoulder as a fellow Christian, I was hard pressed to not become more emotional.

So, what? The point is that I got home finally and got a hug from Mrs. Hawkdriver, (not … you know) and we prayed thanks for all of those people. Does it prove the existence of God? Not to everyone. Will some folks think not everyone that stopped was or needed to be a person of faith? Yep. And they’d be right. One couldn’t know what motivated all their hearts. But it is proof to me and what reaffirms my faith with every minor miracle that occurs in our lives. That some would concede on that road that God was in some way looking out for us still, was like an answer to the frantic little prayers in the back of my head. Like the Grandma praying from inside her car behind my trailer and like the two guys that came back. It makes me feel The Lord in my life as surely as I knew he was there looking after me and my men back when we were deployed. We have people here I respect from the bottom of my heart for their Conservative commentary, that lose me because of their vehement debate of the “ignorance of Christianity and religion”. Stronger Christians than me here argue with them, verse and history. I can’t ever do that because the debates are canned and repeated and rarely would cause someone to change their beliefs one way or the other. But I think it is a worthy event to give an insight to what drives our hearts and our faiths. As I said, I’m not a great Christian, but I do recognize when I’m being led to share. I should have in the original comment, but it always seems to draw controversial comments when you attribute like I finally have here.

So, here is what I believe. In our darkest times he’s still there. Instead of news of someone having an accident because of me, I’ll forever recall how blessed I was that something so dangerous ended so well and that as I sit here and type, the trailer is on the property waiting for me for me to use the material to start building. And as Cindy Munford would relate from emails, the progress on the new property has been a great source of frustration to us and we struggle to keep pushing a difficult portion of it. Last night might have been a breaking point for me. But, today I am reaffirmed and I dedicate all we are able to accomplish out there to our Lord.